A Spatial-Grid Evacuation Model for Buildings

Evacuation systems are designed as a means to protect people in emergency situations in buildings. The traditional design of an egress system in a building normally follows the prescriptive requirements stipulated in fire or building codes. The codes usually govern the capacity of exit routes, which are normally based on intuitive judgment. With the advancement of digital com puters, egress models that can account for the interrelationship of different parts of a building have been developed. They generally can be categorized into two approaches, namely, coarse network models and fine network models. The fine network models can effectively describe the movement pattern of each indi vidual in a building. Such information can be adapted to a virtual reality presen tation that can help building designers in presenting their design effectively. A spatial-grid evacuation model, which resembles the fine network approach and can model the relative coordinates of each individual at any point of time, is pro posed in this article. It can effectively handle the individual and crowd behavior. The theoretical background has been discussed and comparison with field data has been made.